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Ep 31: Peak Legal Efficiency: Siddharth Manchanda, IndusLaw Partner & Unacademy External GC
85 Plays9 months ago
What challenges face the legal team at India’s largest learning platform as they expand beyond online classrooms? How do you execute one thousand new contracts a month, and still find time to problem solve and aid core function?
Siddharth Manchanda, Partner at IndusLaw and External GC at Unacademy, has embraced tech and AI in order to free his team from the repetitive manual tasks borne from his company’s fast and massive growth. He’s found that increased efficiency is more than enough to shift the mindsets of traditional lawyers and business teams alike about the power and possibility of tech solutions.
Hear Siddharth as he discusses the legal perspective on India’s massive economic growth, dividing his time between an in-house and client services role, the future of legal tech, and more.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-31
Topics:
Introduction: 0:00
Finding inspiration to practice law: 1:20
Building a career in India’s tech sector during the Great Recession: 6:40
Going in-house with Unacademy: 12:59
Key learnings from a first in-house GC role: 17:13
Considering the perception of legal within your organization: 22:21
Reflecting on the early days at Unacademy: 28:32
Marketing reduced contract drafting time internally: 36:32
Predicting the future of legal tech: 39:14
Using tech experience to change the way you deal with clients: 46:39
Balancing a GC role with a law firm partnership: 49:51
Advice to companies looking to enter the Indian market: 52:27
What you wish you’d know as a young lawyer 59:00
Connect with us:
Siddharth Manchanda - https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharth-manchanda-0970801b/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading CLM platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues. Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
Pragmatism in Business Solutions
00:00:00
Speaker
So if I have to be relevant, I have to be pragmatic, right? At the same time, find solutions for business because they want to do it. So I have to enable them to do it. If I'm not being able to enable them to do it, I better have every possible opportunity or alternative explored and then come up with the conclusion that you cannot do it.
Introduction to Spotdraft
00:00:32
Speaker
The abstract is brought to you by Spotdraft, an end-to-end contract lifecycle management system that helps high-performing legal teams become 10 times more efficient. If you spend hours every week drafting and reviewing contracts, worrying about being blindsided by renewals, or if you just want to streamline your contracting processes, Spotdraft is the right solution for you. From creating and managing templates and workflows, to tracking approvals, e-signing and reporting via an AI-powered repository,
00:01:00
Speaker
Spotdraft helps you in every stage of your contracting. And because it should work where you work, it integrates with all the tools your business already uses. Spotdraft is the key that unlocks the potential of your legal team. Make your contracting easier today at spotdraft.com.
Evolution of the Legal Industry in India
00:01:20
Speaker
How is technology changing the way education is delivered in India? What is it like to boat a legal team to support one of the fastest growing companies here?
00:01:28
Speaker
What should global legal leaders know about operating in India? Today we have Siddharth Manchanda, partner at Indus Law and External General Council of Unacademy. Unacademy is India's largest learning platform and is valued at approximately $3.4 billion.
00:01:45
Speaker
Siddharth previously spent a little more than two years as the full-time GC at an academy, and before that he practiced law at a number of law firms in Mumbai as a transactions lawyer doing mergers and acquisitions, private equity, and corporate restructurings. Siddharth, thanks so much for joining this episode of The Abstract. Thank you for having me, Taylor.
Siddharth's Journey to Law
00:02:06
Speaker
I want to go back in time a little bit and start early on in your career
00:02:12
Speaker
What inspired you to become a lawyer? Well, actually, I'm a lawyer by accident. The inspiration started much later in the day. I was actually studying Tyler to be a doctor, wasn't good enough, frankly, to become one. And it just so happened that I applied to a couple of law schools.
00:02:31
Speaker
because I didn't have to write back then in the day, a while ago, didn't have to write entrance exams to get into some law school, so I applied only to those. And I ended up getting into one. In fact, in the first year at law school, I still was aiming to go back to become a doctor. Really? But I guess gradually I started liking what I was doing and grew into potentially becoming a lawyer.
00:03:00
Speaker
After you graduated from law school, you went and became an associate at a law firm.
Work Culture in Indian Law Firms
00:03:05
Speaker
Now, US law firms have a reputation for working their associates quite hard and very long hours. It's well paid, but it's not an easy way to start your career. Is that the same at Indian law firms? I think it's increasingly become the same. Frankly, I think by the time I started working, which was almost 15 years back,
00:03:27
Speaker
Indian law firms had started following culturally what a lot of firms in the US were doing, right? Which meant that for being a corporate lawyer, you have to put in the hours, you have to meet sometimes bullish client deadlines.
00:03:44
Speaker
and you had to burn the midnight oil. And I believe that culture obviously came from the west and it sort of started getting adopted by Indian firms because the Indian economy also started going through a transformation through that time.
Growth of Indian Capital Markets
00:04:01
Speaker
I mean we started looking for example if you see how the Indian capital markets ecosystem exploded.
00:04:08
Speaker
So there were two phases, there was at the turn of this millennium, there were a couple of years when we had great listings and then the whole practice of capital markets started becoming really big. You had lawyers who wanted to be capital markets lawyers and similarly you started looking at
00:04:28
Speaker
Indian private companies doing M&As, right? So you had Indian lawyers who wanted to become M&A lawyers. And this was a shift that happened, I believe, more at the turn of this millennium. So yes, by
Training Young Lawyers
00:04:40
Speaker
the time I went into that ecosystem, it was brutal, to say the least. But yeah, I mean, that's how Indian firms have evolved. That's how Indian firms have learned and adopted culturally from the American firms.
00:04:55
Speaker
Do you feel like that's good training? I mean, I think most people in the US find that if they spend a number of years at a law firm and then they transition to being in-house, that that time at the law firm was really good sort of training in how to analyze problems, strong writing skills, et cetera. Do you feel the same about your time at a law firm as you prepared to go in-house?
00:05:17
Speaker
I think you'll find different people have been different point of view on this. And I don't think there's a right or wrong, right? I think it's personally, I believe that for all young lawyers starting out, it's ideal to spend some time at a law firm. And the reasons for that are some of them, obviously, you pointed out, right, that your formative years of how you communicate, how you write, how you draft,
00:05:44
Speaker
how your analytical skills get fine-tuned, all of these, you would learn better at a law firm. And as I said, again, I think this is a personal view more than anything else. That's because the rigors they put you through.
00:05:58
Speaker
Coming back again to how culturally law firms function in a way that you don't have options. If you have client deadlines and client deadlines are always aggressive to say the least, especially on the corporate side of things, if you have to deal with that, you're left with no option.
00:06:19
Speaker
to learn fast and to learn on the job. And that rigor, I believe, pushes you to learn some of these tricks of the trade, which ultimately help you become better and more sophisticated and also deal with situations in a more systematic and organized manner. Therefore, I think for initial few years, it's good if you get that kind of
Post-2009 Economic Stability in India
00:06:40
Speaker
experience.
00:06:40
Speaker
You spent about 12 years at various law firms before joining an academy in 2021. That time period was
00:06:50
Speaker
the sort of growth out of the great recession or what we call the great recession in the United States. I'm curious if you could give us a little bit of context on what the economic environment in India was like during that time period and how perhaps that inspired you or led you to a place where you felt like you were ready to go and join a tech client.
00:07:15
Speaker
So this, I think I'll divide my career into two phases. First is when I was just starting out. And this is 2009, Tyler, which is the peak of the recession that we are talking about.
00:07:28
Speaker
So coming out of law school, you are worried about a job. And then the year before, which was 2008, we had this booming year in the Indian economy. And most people, even if you're less than an average lawyer getting placed well, and then you have 2009 and suddenly there are no jobs.
00:07:47
Speaker
So yes, the initial few years in terms of what you want to do, where do you want to start, whether you have enough opportunities out there, whether there is enough work in the market for corporate lawyers, I think that was a challenging part and consequently great learning.
00:08:04
Speaker
Those two, three years, I think, were the slow sort of years of the Indian economy vis-a-vis the time that I started off. And things started becoming normal. I think by 2011, 2012, Indian economy had sort of started stabilizing again from the after-effects of what happened in the US. And I think there's also a realization that we need, as a country, we need to be a little more self-dependent
00:08:32
Speaker
such that events like this don't impact us in the way that they did. So, macro level ships combined with a lot of focus on building for India, combined with generally some of the Indian companies becoming more global,
00:08:52
Speaker
I think multiple factors led to the economy booming again and that for us as lawyers turned out to be great times.
Legal Work with Startups
00:09:03
Speaker
What I ended up doing a little bit more of was working with slightly more new age companies.
00:09:10
Speaker
quintessential startups definition. And that personally also I believe worked out well, because I got to experience a totally different ecosystem. Look, the startup ecosystem in terms of advising them from an external lawyer standpoint is very different from working with old school or traditional conglomerates, right? They're fast, they raise capital fast.
00:09:38
Speaker
and their expectations from lawyers are very different. So that kind of learning also I think for the whole Indian legal ecosystem is not more than 10 years old because before that we did not have that much so as to speak activity on this side. So more revenues opened up, it gave us more opportunities to grow as lawyers, it gave us new things that we could try out, new kind of
00:10:04
Speaker
organizations and companies and clients we could work with.
Impact of Economic Cycles on Legal Work
00:10:07
Speaker
So yes, you do have your ups and downs in terms of whether you have enough client work or not to do. And in fact, if you see in this ecosystem of startups, right, the last two, last 24 months haven't been that great since the funding winter has come through. Yes. And therefore, you know, you have to evolve and try and find out other avenues of work, right. You,
00:10:29
Speaker
So there's a lot of M&A, but not cash M&A. So you're doing share swaps, you're helping companies merge. The ones which don't have capital are merging into bigger ones. Investors are driving sort of transactions to reduce their losses or to
00:10:46
Speaker
Well, hopefully look at longer durations by which they have to return their capital. I guess economic boom allows us to do more traditional M&A private equity venture capital work and economic downtime allows us to do a different kind of transactional work and lawyers find way to survive in both of these.
00:11:08
Speaker
It seems like an incredible time to have grown up as a lawyer here, almost like growing up as a lawyer in the 90s in Silicon
Joining Unacademy
00:11:21
Speaker
Valley. It's still actually very early. I'm curious, after having such a successful run and making partner at a law firm, what led you to decide to want to go in-house and why you decided to join an academy full-time?
00:11:37
Speaker
So an academy actually used to be a client dialogue. I had worked with them over a number of years. Having said that, there was no plan to go in-house. I mean, I was pretty comfortable in my space working in private practice. But then I also saw an academy grow by leaps and bounds, especially during 2019, 2020, beginning of COVID, when EdTech as a whole went through this insane boom.
00:12:06
Speaker
whether it's valuations, whether it's reputation, whether it's the brand, etc., everything was just going through the roof. So when the opportunity came by, given the familiarity, given the sector, given the company itself and the founders who I had worked with for so many years and who I know are some of the best founders you could work with in this country, it just looked like something that I shouldn't let go.
00:12:30
Speaker
at that point in time in my career. I was still young back then, not so much now, but back then it just looked like the right thing to do. Coupled with the fact that I would get to experience a different side, and if I have to do that familiarity with the ecosystem and the company itself, I couldn't have done it with any other company but an academy. It just happened that a culmination of all these factors led me to take that decision.
Unacademy and Democratizing Education
00:13:00
Speaker
We're going to come back to that point or that question around what you learned as a part of being in house and how that's maybe changed the way that you lawyer in private practice today, uh, in just a little bit. But we've got a big international listener base. Uh, if you live in India, I'm sure everybody knows an academy, but for those who aren't familiar, would you mind telling us just a little bit about the business? Sure.
00:13:25
Speaker
I may not be the right person for the business pitch, but from a very 360 degree overview, right? An academy is actually India's largest learning platform. It's in a segment where it prepares students for competitive exams. India is, a lot of people in India know, and maybe for international audience, India is a
00:13:52
Speaker
big market for a large population. Not everybody can get into good colleges or good courses. Therefore, there's a lot of competition to get into good courses, whether it's engineering, medical, civil services, etc.
00:14:07
Speaker
And therefore, we have entrance exams for a lot of these courses and colleges. Now to get into those colleges, therefore, is very competitive. And a large industry, consequently, is an industry which prepares you for these competitive exams. And that's what is bread and butter for an academy. Traditionally, this segment has purely been offline.
00:14:31
Speaker
Interesting. So the Indian offline coaching industry, as we call it, has been around for decades. In fact, there are cities in India which are known to churn ranks in some of these competitive exams. So that industry has been around for long. But what an academy wanted to do and I think managed to do to a great extent is change the perception that
00:14:57
Speaker
education in this space can only be imparted offline, right? Why can't somebody sitting in a small town in northern part of the country, why can't somebody study with, let's say, the best teacher for maths for an IT exam who's sitting out of Bangalore, right? So you are giving everybody an opportunity to learn from the best at a much lesser price because the cost inputs are lower, right? You're using tech to reach out to
00:15:26
Speaker
a wider audience as opposed to a room this size where you have 20 desks and a teacher teaching only those people who are attending the class. So you're reaching out to a wider audience, you're doing the larger good as well, and you're able to sort of, you know, democratize education as an academy's founders like to call it, right? So this is what an academy focuses on.
00:15:53
Speaker
This is where the company grew really, really big during COVID years because there was no offline education, right? And then, you know, the growth was tremendous. And then once COVID ended, we realized that we also need to be in offline, right? Because from, I mean, ultimately we have investors, we have stakeholders, everybody needs to see growth, et cetera. And therefore we decided, look,
00:16:16
Speaker
Why just look at online? Why can't we teach learners in a hybrid method? So let's say if I set up a classroom in Bangalore and I actually record everything that is stored in that classroom or I live stream that class, which everybody who's an online subscriber of that course on an academy can also see. So this learner can actually look at 20 different educators in online, but can also learn
00:16:44
Speaker
from an offline class, which is being streamed online. So this is what in a nutshell, Tyler and Academy does. It just helps people prepare for some of these competitive exams through both online and offline modes. It's really a fantastic business because it's creating a lot more opportunity to grow and have a better shot at education, no matter where you live.
Adapting Legal Mindset at Unacademy
00:17:12
Speaker
This was your first in-house role. Uh, you stepped into a GC role and built a team around you. Uh, I think maybe at its peak 10, 15 people or so, I'm curious what you had to learn. Did you have to learn, pick up new management skills, right? That's different than being in a law firm as a partner, working with a sort of wide variety of associates.
00:17:37
Speaker
It's chalk and cheese. And the first day I entered an academy's office, there's this huge poster at the reception which says learn and then cancels it out, says unlearn, and it writes that 10 times over. And sitting here today,
00:17:55
Speaker
Or maybe, well, not today, maybe a couple of months back when you sit back and reflect exactly what one has to do. And I don't know because I have no comparison points whether working in-house is the same for any lawyer who goes from private practice to in-house. But for me, it was essentially this
00:18:18
Speaker
learn and unlearn every single day. So I think the reason for that multiple reasons, but we can focus on a couple of big ticket
00:18:28
Speaker
line items, which I would say are my learnings. So look, when you are in private practice, A, also I was accustomed to it. I'd done it for most part of my career. So you know the drill, you know what it takes, you know how to handle and manage client expectations, you know the speed at which you have to deliver, you know how to manage the team, etc, etc.
00:18:50
Speaker
When you come this side of the table and you deal with a hyper startup, which is grown from nothing to three and a half billion dollar company in a matter of two, three years, you realize that they do things at 100 extra speed. So one day you are trying to get into a new market and you're working towards it and you've got lawyers, you've got lawyers from across the world, you're trying to structure how you're going to do it.
00:19:18
Speaker
And then suddenly in a few months, you want to shut it. And then a learning for me was that you don't go all in from a legal standpoint on day one, because you have to think of this in the same manner that a business person is thinking. You have to think of this as an experiment that they're doing.
00:19:39
Speaker
You don't have to think of it as a traditional corporate or just purely as an external advisor that, look, if I'm going into a new market, I have to ensure that I tick all boxes. I have to tick all the necessary boxes. I have to tick all the mandatory ones. The good to have, let's take a pragmatic call on that.
00:19:59
Speaker
And that culminates into the time that you spend on a project like this, that culminates into the cost that you
Crafting Effective Business Legal Solutions
00:20:05
Speaker
incur. Let's say legal cost, for example, to implement a project like this. And at the end of it, if that experiment hasn't worked, you look like a fool. So one critical learning was how you have to be pragmatic and look at everything, every business decision from that lens.
00:20:27
Speaker
Only then you will be able to come up with a solution which is not a pure legal solution. And at least for me personally, my role was to not give pure legal solution. Nobody wants that. They're not interested. It takes 20 pages of CYA in terms of how you can do this and what are the things you have to worry about. Nobody's even going to read one page. Probably they're going to read
00:20:56
Speaker
four lines of WhatsApp message, which only requires you to inform what needs to be done and whether you're sure that there are enough mitigation measures or you're comfortable that there are enough mitigation measures that can be taken. And don't say no. If you're saying no, it's assumed that you've looked at even the remotest possibility
00:21:19
Speaker
of being able to do this, right? After that, if your answer is no, it'll be understood. But you have to earn that as well, Tyler, right? Because as again, learn, unlearn. So in the beginning, I realized that if I'm doing this, I'm sort of presenting my side in a manner that I'm not being crisp and clear on being able to do or not do anything, people don't care, right?
00:21:48
Speaker
And slowly and gradually, you would potentially find yourself not being involved in some of those decisions, which is counterintuitive for the org and defeats the purpose of you being there. So if I have to be relevant, I have to be pragmatic. At the same time, find solutions for business because they want to do it.
00:22:08
Speaker
So I have to enable them to do it. If I'm not being able to enable them to do it, I better have every possible opportunity or alternative explored and then come up with the conclusion that you cannot do it. I'm curious to hear a little bit about some of the biggest accomplishments that you think an academy's legal team has had over the past few years.
Proactive Legal Strategies
00:22:32
Speaker
I may call them accomplishments, but others may differ. Look, I think we have to be realistic in what legal teams do in-house. They're not always objective ways of measuring output. It's not that I'm driving X amount of revenue, so I had a target and I did that. Therefore, accomplishments also have to be looked at or understood from that lens.
00:23:00
Speaker
done everything that I was supposed to do, which as I see it is full function, right? Or am I being a push function and actually implementing stuff which I think are helping the company become better? One aspect is that look, you get a contract, you review it, you finalize it, you send it.
00:23:20
Speaker
you look at a complaint, let's say a consumer matter in our business, which comes your way and you look at it, you solve it, you move on. What are you doing to make the contracts better? What are you doing to reduce the complaints? What kind of frameworks are you creating to have better governance standards? What are you doing to prevent litigations? What are your strategies around whole host of other things, which is potentially partially legal?
00:23:48
Speaker
I think some of those things we were able to work on. I'll give you some illustrations. The entire contract management piece. When I went into an academy, an academy has always been a contract-heavy org. So we don't have a lot of, let's say, click-wrap agreements. We actually do wedding agreements or whatever, digital signature agreements.
00:24:15
Speaker
At a peak of growth, you do 1000 agreements a month. And just doing that manually is so counterintuitive. And the team member doing it will lose interest and will run away.
Adopting Tech Solutions for Contract Management
00:24:31
Speaker
Yeah, because they're doing the same thing over and over and over again. And so is the learning ways upskilling, etc. So we wanted to become better at it. You can't have more people that can be a solution, because you're not a revenue function, you're a support function. So you have to look at your costs, you have to look at becoming more efficient, right? So you can say, Oh, I will use this template, that template, but in a fast evolving ecosystem, like an academy, a template will outlive in two months, because some new model would have come in and you're looking at a modus operandi, which has never been thought of.
00:25:01
Speaker
And you are again reinventing the wheel, right? So the only solution that I could think of was using tech. Yeah. Right. And to be honest, if you ask most Indian lawyers and coming from private practice, he hate tech. He hates into billable hours.
00:25:17
Speaker
I can charge for maybe spending 10 hours on cleaning up a document and telling a client that, oh, we were reviewing the whole thing four times over. Don't quote me on this. But there's no way to become efficient unless you imbibe and adopt tech.
00:25:38
Speaker
So it was first for me personally, it was a mind shift that I had to imbibe and once and things became easier because, you know, with some tough times, you know, the team had to be smaller, et cetera. So how do we still manage to do the same work that we were doing with more people? There was no option. Right. So just like find a way to use tech. So we, we, we work towards creating a very robust contract management ecosystem.
00:26:07
Speaker
I think it's at least in Indian context, I know fair bit of people in the ecosystem. I think we've done a good job of it. It's nowhere close to where one would like it to be, but it's still better than a lot of other people. So that's one thing that using tech as a whole cross various pieces of the legal function is something that we did.
00:26:28
Speaker
And secondly, as simple as it may sound, there's a lack of processes that I think most enough ecosystems have, like as basic as do you have an SOP on how to onboard an educator.
00:26:43
Speaker
Do you have an SOP on how to deal with an ethics issue? Do you have an SOP of how to deal with a consumer complaint? And when I say SOP, I'm not saying write five lines that will go to this email ID and you will solve it. You have to dive deep into it. And we have so much data. We are a company which
00:27:09
Speaker
has millions of users, has thousands of educators, have so many employees. There are enough problem statements that we have seen. So what do you need to do? You need to collate those statements. You need to analyze them. You need to divide them into buckets. And then you need to create an ecosystem of solving it. So it may sound very simple. Perhaps the problem that a lot of in-house lawyers face
00:27:35
Speaker
is that they are not given a holistic picture at an org level. And therefore, I think, again, I was blessed, still continue to be blessed to get that overall ecosystem. And if you come to think of it, there are only very limited functions which get to see everything from business, to financials, to
00:27:58
Speaker
marketing to sales, right? And legal and finance are those. So if people want to take initiatives in these functions and create an all-income passing SOP, where you clearly define who's supposed to do what, I don't think it's that difficult. But A, because a lot of people in-house or legal leaders are not given that kind of freedom. Or B, I think it comes, it's a very individualistic trait as well. I think it's in terms of how much
00:28:27
Speaker
problem solving you want to do as a pull function as compared to just doing what you're sort of expected to do. You've talked a lot about how you've leveraged technology to run the legal team at Unacademy more efficiently, but also more effectively.
Implementing CLM at Unacademy
00:28:45
Speaker
that's actually helped you retain top talent internally because nobody wants to be doing sort of rote, mundane tasks over and over and over again. And Unacademy's business model lends itself towards needing technology because you have a thousand agreements coming in a month.
00:29:02
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about what the early days of implementing a CLM, implementing Spot Draft were like, because in some ways that sounds actually quite daunting, like it might have been a huge undertaking. How did you prepare your team to go about that? And also how did you get the other stakeholders in the business that you needed to be involved to trust that this was the right path forward? I think there's no like vanilla solution to something like this, right? As you can imagine.
00:29:32
Speaker
First is the mind shift that has to happen. And as I just mentioned, that was something that I personally had to do as well. And then get the mind from the team, which is difficult. Lawyers just don't like change, myself included. It's just like we are so set in our
00:29:54
Speaker
And I think that is a bit to do with our trainings. Most Indian lawyers today that you see well maybe not today but like a decade back are all
00:30:05
Speaker
trained by traditional old school lawyers. And therefore, no tech follow a system, do certain things in certain way. Of course, things are changing now, evolving. But that is intrinsic to how lawyers, at least in India, function. And that is what I can comment on. So the most difficult part, I think, is how do you get
00:30:33
Speaker
Buying from the team right and what at least in my case made it easier because everybody was just formed doing the same thing over and over again and People were losing interest it actually led to me losing a couple of team members and it's not it's just a waste of their talent because if I'm not training them and
00:30:54
Speaker
and they are unhappy with the work that they do. And it's not for lack of work at an academy. See, if that was the case, then you can understand that people don't want to work here, but it's just that they just are not getting, some of them at least are not getting an opportunity to do all of that. Let's say we have a subset of contracts team, if they're doing the same thing over and over again, they are feeling that man, where is my growth? Where is my learning, right? And how would I upskill?
00:31:23
Speaker
So, the first thing was to give them their own pinpoints and tell them, look, we could change that. And as you can imagine, there was pushback, there was issues around
00:31:35
Speaker
people not following instructions, etc. and saying, oh, I had work, I have to prioritize this. So it took a little bit of playing good cop, bad cop, get someone else to say, oh, you know how the drill works. So it was a constant process, didn't happen overnight. I think potentially once the original set of bunch of people bought in to the idea, seeing the advantages of it,
00:32:01
Speaker
then it becomes slightly easier because then you move to the next phase of implementing it, right, which of course, given the volumes, etc, was not an easy task at an academy, but once you have the bind, you have a vision
00:32:16
Speaker
Then you have a path and the path prescribes, let's say to begin with, let's collate every agreement that has existed ever in the ecosystem. It may take three months, it may take six months, but we have to do it because right now it's sitting on 50 laptops and 200 minds.
00:32:34
Speaker
How do I get all of it in one ecosystem? So that took its time, of course, painful in terms of getting all the data, organizing it. So that took its while. As I mentioned, 1000 contracts a month, we were dealing with like tons of thousands of contracts, which all have to first go into an ecosystem. So that was phase one of the exercise. Once we've got them into the ecosystem, I have the data now setting.
00:33:04
Speaker
right it at a place where if the tech evolves I may be able to deconstruct the data right so the first exercise is moving all of it in one place the second piece is how do I now start using it and then eventually deconstructing it right so in phase two we started then templatizing the drafts we ensured that everything
00:33:27
Speaker
in terms of contracts is end to end structured within the CLM tool that we use, in this case being spot draft. So everything right from raising a request for a contract to executing the contract, everything is on that tool.
00:33:44
Speaker
It is painful. People want to sign contracts physically. People want to sign contracts using another digital signature tool. But if I do that, I move outside of the ecosystem, which means I lose control over the contracts. And then they don't sit here. If they don't sit here, how will I deconstruct them tomorrow? So that was phase two. And now, which I think is a work in progress is
00:34:09
Speaker
how do we start analyzing the data to make our contracts better? How do we start deconstructing those contracts and give out data in a matter of seconds? Because all of it should be tagged in a way that I should be able to extract all of it. Otherwise, what is the point of having a repository?
00:34:30
Speaker
So it took a mix of all of that. The bigger problem was to get business team members to do, let's say, inputs on raising a request for a contract because they used to send over emails, Slack, WhatsApp, coming and standing and saying, do this. So moving that, moving approval matrix on the CLM tool, all of that took a little bit of
00:34:55
Speaker
Again, playing good cop, bad cop, little bit of nudging, a little bit of explaining and making the input process itself friendly to them. And sometimes a little bit of fear that look tomorrow if something like this happened, if somebody asks you for approval, where would it be? You will spend two hours trying to figure out here. If you input it here, it will be available to you in a matter of seconds. So to make them understand the advantages that they have if they use this tool,
00:35:24
Speaker
or sort of organize their inputs on this tool a little bit of a mix of all of that and as I said it didn't happen overnight it is still a work in progress you still have people who want to not follow this right but we have created enough background already to showcase right or enough proof that this works well and it gives you speed once they know that it gives you speed
00:35:49
Speaker
They are happy, right? So for example, we also did Tyler self-serve contracts. So let's say there's a new business model. They want to send 500 contracts in a day. I can't do that. So I created a self-serve contract where the input, they fill in the blanks, imagine a form, a Google form equivalent.
00:36:06
Speaker
you fill in the blanks and the contract gets generated and they can send it themselves. But the beauty is I can't let them change the contract because they have no control. So I have put controls on access for them. So they can't download it. If they have to download it, they have to come to me with the request to make changes to a standard form contract. But as long as it's that standard form contract, they can send out thousands, I don't even need to know. And it gets stored on my CLM tool.
00:36:35
Speaker
You talked about speed. I think for the contracts with educators, getting new educators onto the platform, it's gone from a week down to less than 24 hours.
Marketing Legal Tech Wins
00:36:46
Speaker
You've also talked about the mindset shift that needs to happen. People need to understand what their incentive in participating in this process. It's not just tech, it's process.
00:36:57
Speaker
Talk to us about the importance of marketing those sorts of wins internally, or also how you can go about marketing those wins most effectively.
00:37:07
Speaker
I think the one thing that I learned is that you have to talk in numbers. Now I don't have revenue numbers to show, but I can show how many contracts I spent out in what period of time. So let's say if I'm able to create an SOP and showcase that it took me X time,
00:37:27
Speaker
to do a contract to now do Y time, which is 90% more efficient than X, then I have, it's a win for me, right? And as a result of which I have more bandwidth to be able to turn around more contracts. Or I have more bandwidth to do, as I said, more proactive work, right? So the time saved is time invested elsewhere, right? So with, let's say, the KRAs, as you would call it for us would be,
00:37:56
Speaker
how much more are we able to achieve with the same set of people. So, if you put numbers around it, if you put
00:38:03
Speaker
If you can measure efficiency in some form of numbers, I think the business people understand and see through it. They understand that this is certainly something that is better. And their stakeholder, let's say a business person managing an educator, he wants him on board today because if it goes to tomorrow, a competitor will come and pay him higher and get him on board. So if I'm able to do it today because of tech, which I wasn't able to do two years back because I didn't use tech,
00:38:31
Speaker
this guy has seen and he's my he's the one who's standing behind and saying you know I'm your cheerleader yes right I know that you could achieve this because you have showcased to me and I've seen outcomes everything is output outcomes right so he he or she is able to see that outcome and say hey you know I know that you're able to do it faster but you know expectations still continue to be what they are if you're able to do it in five hours people may want it in two hours so that's
00:38:59
Speaker
That's something that you have to live with. Um, but, but yes, I mean, there is enough proof that we've been able to create over a period of time to showcase through numbers, through, um, people understanding and appreciating how we are enabling them to become better or look better. You're obviously very passionate about the use of technology and your team has done pretty proactive job at adopting it and leveraging it.
00:39:27
Speaker
I'm curious where you see legal tech headed as, as an industry, what your sort of predictions are for the legal tech space.
AI and the Evolution of Legal Tech
00:39:37
Speaker
It's a good question. In fact, I was thinking if I should have maybe started a company focused on legal tech a few years back, but spot draft is hiring. Well, well, I mean, like, like be an entrepreneur and, and
00:39:53
Speaker
and do legal tech, right? But with us lawyers, we always miss the bus. You see all these industries who are doing well, and somebody who works a lot in the startup ecosystem, you see suddenly EdTech and then FinTech and DeepTech and SaaS and whatever, and then you're like, oh, I should have done this two years. But I think, look, it's always been around.
00:40:19
Speaker
including in India. I mean, we're not talking about something that has just come out of the blue. For example, somebody was mentioning to me that there are approximately 200
00:40:30
Speaker
CLM solution providers in India 200. Can you imagine? Very crowded. Yes, very crowded market. Right. But I'm guessing most people to who to who it is aimed at, which is us lawyers, you can't name more than 10. Sure. Right. So proof that it's always been around. Now what is suddenly building interest and it's not only in India, right? I mean, there are few unicorns,
00:40:56
Speaker
In the States, legal tech companies are doing really, really well. So there's this sudden interest from investors. I think it's primarily to do with the audience on this side of the table becoming more open to the idea.
00:41:12
Speaker
And when I say that, I'm counting all lawyers. I'm counting lawyers on the advisory side, on private practice. I'm counting in-house lawyers. I mean, I'm sure you've heard about magic circle firms actually spending tons and millions of dollars to build tech solutions, which will sit on top of their repositories. And why are they doing that? Because they have the data. They have to find a way to deconstruct it or to sort of find
00:41:42
Speaker
solutions which will help them analyze their data better. So, I think that shift in mindset
00:41:51
Speaker
Because it's tech everywhere, so how long can lawyers resist it? I think it's dawned upon us. And as a result, we are more open to the idea, because we are more open to the idea, coupled with the fact that you now have AI layers sitting on top of a lot of legal tech solutions, it just gives it an entirely new dimension. The analysis can be
00:42:16
Speaker
in a matter of seconds, the analysis is not dependent upon the input as much. I don't necessarily need to have tagged documents to be able to extract the kind of data or information that I need anymore, right? Because AI is going to do it for me, right? So that, or I think that has added a new dimension to it, which is driving a lot of interest in the sector.
00:42:41
Speaker
from investors, from us as lawyers, because everybody, what is the biggest problem, Tyler, right? Like everybody has data. For example, we are a pretty large firm, right? We are a firm of approximately 70 partners, 400 plus lawyers, the largest firms in the country, tons of data, decades of data. If I need something urgently, okay, I have a WhatsApp group, maybe I will ask someone, you know, people may be busy, etc. I also have a repository, right?
00:43:09
Speaker
How can I just go to that repository and quickly find out what are the patterns developed on an indemnity clause in the last five years? What kind of provisions have we agreed from the company side when we are looking at an indemnity clause? What are the kind of exit provisions we have seen over thousands and thousands of shareholders agreement that we worked on as a firm, right?
00:43:34
Speaker
it should be a matter of seconds. And any kind of legal tech solution, primarily AI driven these days, should be able to give me that answer rather quickly, because it seamlessly should be able to integrate with my data, sit on top of it, extract information, analyze it, summarize it and give it to me. I'll give you a classic example. As recently, I was on a client call. And unfortunately, all the younger team members are busy with different mandates, I did not have someone else
00:44:02
Speaker
and you know how minutes of meetings are very critical in our profession so that you get everybody on the board with largest transactions so we didn't want anything to get lost in translation. And I have to speak and negotiate in that meeting.
00:44:17
Speaker
So how am I going to take nodes? So I downloaded one voice to node transcript AI app and it is fantastic. And it is sending the summary of the nodes and the transcript both to everybody. It has an option to send it to everybody who attended the call. So I don't have to spend one hour
00:44:43
Speaker
seeing what a younger team member has drafted minutes of the meeting because maybe an important client you don't want like anything to be written what wasn't discussed or interpreted what wasn't discussed but this is just beautiful right yes right so what I mean is that that solution I mean anybody who uses virtual calls can use it right but it is so critical for lawyers right because
00:45:09
Speaker
And I don't, if I miss a meeting, I can still listen or see the transcript of that meeting, right? Because I could not attend it. So nobody needs to call me and spend one hour explaining to me what transpired on that call. I can just read it with no questions of any mistakes. Of course, whatever the tech also has some limitation. Maybe they'll mispronounce some names and all of that. But I mean, I'll get the gist, right? I'll get to know exactly what happened on that call. So
00:45:37
Speaker
I think the potential is immense. I think the sooner we learn to imbibe it and adopt it and not resist it better for us. Otherwise, there are things that it will start doing, which will take away from what I today charge for. So if I have to be realistic, I find a way to use it.
00:46:01
Speaker
to upscale and to give a better product to the client. Minutes of the meeting is just one very small example around it. How do I use tech to improve my efficiency and everybody's cost conscious these days? How do I show that I'm able to do the same kind of work?
00:46:19
Speaker
with lesser man hours because I'm still going to get paid only that much. The salaries are not reducing. Younger team members coming year on year are getting paid more and more. So I have to look at my cost structure as well. So instead of five people, if I have four and then one's job because that person is probably taking minutes of the meeting and doing diligence is done by tech. Why not? At fraction of a cost. You're a very forward looking lawyer, embracing technology.
Gaining Insights from In-House Experience
00:46:48
Speaker
I'm curious beyond just tech, what your time in house taught you and the sort of lessons you've brought back to being a law firm partner. Do you advise your clients in a different way now that you've been on the other side of the table or the other side of the Zoom call? Well, I abuse them less in my mind because I know that they are genuinely going through the pain
00:47:15
Speaker
of the timelines, which is a single largest problem every lawyer will crib about on the advisory side. I know that there's genuine pressure because I've seen it.
00:47:34
Speaker
So, empathizing has gone up a notch with the clients. Understanding their problems from that perspective has improved. Well, I like to believe it has improved. And the second thing is, I think just understanding business perspectives
00:47:56
Speaker
I think just comes a little more, I'm not saying that as external advisors, you can survive without getting business perspective, but I think you get a little bit more business perspective. After you spend some time in house, you're able to appreciate it better, you're able to sometimes ask better questions, right? You're sometimes able to see
00:48:19
Speaker
problems which you in a vanilla diligence exercise, for example, working with a company on the outside would not have focused on because it was just very, how do I put it? It was very, it was same. You would look at a company, you would send the same checklist, you would look at the same, you look at the same documents, you will identify similar problems. That ability perhaps to look at things slightly differently, I think it comes with that experience a little bit more.
00:48:49
Speaker
I mean, our time will tell. It's just been a couple of months that I've come back to practice. But at least in my conversations with clients, I'm asking some different questions, okay? Whether it culminates into revenue or not, as I said, we'll figure out. But I think the clients do appreciate that. They appreciate the fact that you are not just being a superficial, typical transaction lawyer. You are trying to find real issues.
00:49:18
Speaker
or you're trying to dive deeper. I think that is a big learning because until unless you understand business, you can't ask the right questions. If you can't ask the right questions, there are thousands of lawyers who are smarter than me, better than me, who will do a better job. So what is it that I can sell better? It's my experience of being on the other side, which culminates into
00:49:46
Speaker
potentially asking better questions and looking at things which maybe, maybe other people may not have looked at. It's only been a couple of months, but you're both serving as a partner at Indus Law and also as external GC of an Academy. How are you balancing those two roles? That sounds like a lot of work. You should ask my wife. It's, uh, can't complain in terms of,
00:50:15
Speaker
getting to be on both sides, Tyler. People say grass is greener on the other side. True. I can say that I have one leg here and one leg there and therefore get to experience great aspects of both sides of the world. In terms of how you balance your time, etc., I think it's something that I'm learning.
00:50:40
Speaker
It's a work in progress because I'm still, at least for both sides, I'm still 100% supposed to be available for them. And I don't want that to change because then I'm not also doing justice in my mind at least to my jobs. So it's just about how
00:51:08
Speaker
much I can improve at multitasking or how constantly I can evolve again by using tech, by becoming potentially better at delegation, by organizing my time better. Actually, some of these things I'm doing better now because I have more pressure. I'm using tech to take notes. I'm trying to become a slave of my calendar.
00:51:31
Speaker
I'm becoming more and more calendar driven now, which again is something that I learned when I was in house because I saw how my founder functions, he's just like, let's just calendar drive his day. I mean, it's easier said than done, but I'm saying that if you put every small thing in there and get into a ritual of following it for a week, it's just fantastic.
00:51:56
Speaker
It's just about getting all of these things together. I don't think I am even remotely close to doing justice to either side, but I'm trying to do better on a daily basis, trying to improve. I have certainly become better at multitasking. I can type.
00:52:13
Speaker
on WhatsApp and speak to somebody on a Zoom call by and large simultaneously without sort of asking somebody to repeat something on the call. So yeah, I think it's just, it's just, can't complain. It's just intensely exciting. We've talked a bit about all the opportunity that exists in the Indian economy today. We have a lot of American listeners, European listeners of the podcast.
Tailoring Business Strategies to India's Market
00:52:42
Speaker
I'm curious, and you've worked with global businesses, businesses here abroad. Curious if you have advice for those who want to enter the Indian market or want to do business with Indian firms on how to go about that and maybe mistakes that you often see global companies looking to work in India making that others can avoid. Actually, I think our government does a fair
00:53:10
Speaker
fairly good job of advertising this, but I mean, foreign direct investment. We've had those numbers just go through the roof, right? Yes. You have to give the credit to the government and its policies for doing so. I think there's some learnings that you can actually
00:53:32
Speaker
see on basis of how the Indian ecosystem has evolved as well. I will give you some examples. When Indian status started building out products, the initial thought was that you just do what is working in the US and replicate it in India. That was the mindset for a lot of Indian founders, let us say, because you know, you studied there or you have gone there and you have seen
00:53:57
Speaker
some billion dollar companies how they've built and you just like come and replicate the business model. I don't think and it's now a matter of fact that everybody's realized it doesn't work until you focus on what India wants right and it may not necessarily be what a west sort of wants right. So if you're building for India if you're focusing on the Indian consumer
00:54:24
Speaker
And forget start of the Indian retail conglomerates have proven time and again that if you focus on the right matrix for the Indian consumers, whether it's pricing, whether it's competition, whether it's advertisement, marketing, sales, if you focus on the right matrix and you build for India,
00:54:51
Speaker
I think there's no way you can't succeed. But you have to get thousands of things, right? We are a very unique market. That's what everybody will tell you. I genuinely think we are a unique market. If you see, let's take some examples, and this is all in public domain. For example, if you see Zomato, which is now a state company, it's a food delivery company, one of the largest in the world, and obviously amongst the two largest in India.
00:55:19
Speaker
If you, you know, the founders has gone on record to say that, you know, we went through this phase where we expanded like anything. We went to 300 cities in India, 400 cities in India and to tier 3, tier 4 and there's no business. 80% of the revenue
00:55:39
Speaker
From what I remember is driven from top 10% of the cities interesting top 10 cities and my apologies yeah 80% of the revenues from top 10 cities so they Followed to some extent what happens what has happened with some other companies in Europe where they expanded to all major and
00:55:57
Speaker
But you have to realize that in a smaller city in India, a person focuses on the relationship of calling a restaurant person and directly ordering rather than going and ordering from, let's say, Zomato, even though Zomato is offering your discount. So you may acquire the customer.
00:56:20
Speaker
The day you stop giving discount, the customer will go away from you. And that's actually across several consumer segments, that everything is just discount driven. But a lot of people learned that that's not how you can grow business. So why it might as well focus on the markets.
00:56:38
Speaker
right, where you driven primary revenue. So, therefore, in these markets, Zomato focused on creating a different set of elite offerings, right, which were where they are charging a subscription fee of 1500 rupees, for example, for a quarter, where they give exclusive discounts to these set of users and people are willing to pay happily.
00:57:03
Speaker
But not every tier 2 or tier 3 or tier 4 person will be willing to pay because the ability to go out and spend at a restaurant, which is also by the way an offering that Zomato has, which is where they give discount with this packaging that they've done. People's ability or need to go out and spend the money at a restaurant, the kind of money at a restaurant, maybe that appetite is not there in a tier 3 or tier 4 city. So if you are building for India, if you are
00:57:31
Speaker
doing your research before you build for India. If you are getting your target audience right, depending upon whichever market product offering, service offering you are in, if you get that right, there is no way that you can succeed. It is a volume scheme, but volume itself will not
00:57:48
Speaker
result in success, which ultimately will be measured by revenue and profits. So you may have, you may put out a sort of a tagline saying, I have one crore users in India. Do you have the revenue or is it one crore free users? So do you have the profitability or do you have a path for that? So investors would fund that business maybe for three years or five years, but where is PMF? Where is PMF?
00:58:12
Speaker
revenue, where is the growth, where is profitability? Ultimately, everybody wants that. So for three years, five years, you may have burned money, but where are you going to ultimately make money for your stakeholders, right? So I think opportunities are immense.
00:58:27
Speaker
in every aspect, whether it is B2B, whether it is B2C, whether it is manufacturing, whether it is defence, whether it is retail, I mean you name the sector, everywhere there are enough and more opportunities, you will see players coming in being successful, you will see several foreign
00:58:47
Speaker
conglomerates coming and being successful in certain industries, others failing. I think it all boils down to whether you've understood the Indian sentiment and market. If you've got that right, as simple as it may sound, I think you will get your business right as well. This has been such an interesting conversation. I have a question that I like to ask most of our guests, and I'd like to ask you as we start to wrap up,
00:59:15
Speaker
If you could look back on your days early on as a lawyer, maybe as an associate at the first law firm, what's something that you know now that you wish you'd known back then? I think the one biggest attribute as you grow into this profession that you ought to have is people management skills. I think I still think that a 60 to 70% of what I do today
00:59:43
Speaker
is that and co-ord legal is maybe 30 to 40%. If you start owning your skills on that in the early phase of your career, you will find a way to become better at what you do, irrespective of whether you are in-house or you are at a law firm. If you are in-house is stakeholder management with its founders, whoever you report to.
01:00:08
Speaker
And for law firm, it's with clients. So ultimately, everything is relationship driven. Of course, you have the brand of the firm, etc. But for young lawyers coming through, that will help them grow personally only to a limited extent. The brand or the backing of the firm will take you only so far. What will take you further is
01:00:34
Speaker
being able to hone these skills. So how do you observe people? What do you learn from them? And I think you learn from everyone. I think you learn from people who are difficult with you. You learn from people who are easy with you.
01:00:52
Speaker
I think you learn more from people who are difficult with you because it helps define your personality in terms of what kind of person you want to be when you are dealing with your team or your clients or your stakeholders. It helps you get more clarity on what you would not want to do or how would you not want to shape your working style or culture. So I think
01:01:18
Speaker
I am more than the skill set piece. I think it is the softer element that at least personally I always focused on. I always take key interest in learning and learning about people after observing them. And I think it goes a long way certainly in how you are perceived professionally and how your typical definition of success would emanate from there.
01:01:47
Speaker
That's a great sentiment. Siddharth, thank you so much for joining this episode of The Abstract. Thank you, Tyler. It's been a pleasure. And to our listeners, thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Abstract, and we hope to see you next time.
01:02:06
Speaker
If you enjoyed this episode, I'd recommend that you give my other live interview from Bangalore, India with Hardeep Singh, General Counsel at Cred, a listen. You can also subscribe so you get notified as soon as we post a new episode. And if you liked this one, I'd really love to hear your thoughts, so leave a rating or a comment. If you'd like to reach out to us, our LinkedIn profiles are in the description. See you all next week.